February 2008 Archives
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Another reason to buy Harmony needles
02.21.08 | Tags: Howto, Misc | Comments: (0)I love my Harmony needles from Knitpicks (and so does my dog.) The needles are very sharp, sharp enough to work on socks easily without splitting the yarn. Sharp enough for most work… I recently started on a shawl with lace yarn using the Harmony needles in size 4. In lace work, you need the sharpest needles possible to avoid splitting the yarn and to make knitting the decreases easier. I’ve noticed that one needle tip is always sharper than the other but I don’t usually care which tip I do the knit or purl side on. But on this lace work, I found it quite hard to do both the lace decreases on the knit side and the purl side with the duller of the two needles. I am by no means saying that these tips are dull, they are far sharper than the addi turbo needles (I don’t know about the lace kind.) My solution to this problem was to sharpen my already sharp harmonys even more! I used an emery board and one of those nail files with the four sides to polish your nails.
It only took a minute or two to sharpen the tip and polish it to its original smooth finish.
The left one is the sharpened tip, which makes the right tip (unsharpened but originally the sharper tip) look pretty dull in comparison.If I can remodel my needles, so can my dog! She will manage to chew any wooden needle left out and she even took a few bites of my metal options needles too, no harm were done to them (now that I think of it I hope that wasn’t the reason she had a chipped molar that cost $1000 to fix). I managed to save my dogs chewing destruction to my #8 harmony tip by using the same techniques to sharpen. She did quite a number on it, chewing off a good half inch.
Before and after, good as new, albeit a little stumpier. -
Thermal
02.08.08 | Tags: Sweaters | Comments: (2)
Pattern: Thermal from Knitty.com
Yarn: 3 Skeins of Knitpicks bare fingering wool/nylon
Needle: #3 Knitpicks Harmony circular
Time to complete: 3 weeks
Gripes: a sock yarn knitted out into a sweater, I must be crazy!I think I was kind of nutty to knit an entire pullover out of sock yarn. But I love sock yarn and sock yarn makes a portable subway knitting project. This is a very warm sweater without the weight or bulk, so its worth it to knit a sweater out of sock yarn even if it seems to be nutty.
I didn’t start this sweater on impulse. I’ve been eyeing it for a long time. I had in on my Ravelry queue a few months ago but when I cleaned up my queue list, I removed it. I thought that I would never, ever want to completely knit a sweater out of sock yarn, I would run out of patience before I complete it. So out it went. But then I was obsessively looking at everyone else’s Thermal on Ravelry, I was entranced by them, so I had to knit me one.
I didn’t do a gauge at all for this sweater (which could have turned out very badly). I was very daring, I went straight to the smallest size, went up a needle size and started knitting the body. The smallest size on this pattern is too small for me but I didn’t know I would have enough yarn to make one size up, so the best solution to that was to go up a needle size. This was the closest project to have come to running out of yarn. When I was half way up the second sleeve I did a little measuring to see how much the first sleeve weighed and how much the second sleeve plus the remaining yarn weighed, I only had a few grams extra left over, ok, so I have enough to finish. Boy did I get lucky, I only had about two yards left in the end, my scale wouldn’t even weigh such little amount.
As nutty as knitting a sweater is (the time it took to knit this sweater, I could have knitted 3 pairs of socks), I’m actually planning on knitting a second one out of sock yarn. I’m nuts when it comes to knitting.
About
- Name: Jane
- Occupation: perpetual student and professional yarn hoarder
- Years knitting: 3
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- You can contact me at jane AT okayknits.com
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